Yahoo Platform Targets Google, Microsoft in Online Ad Market

Yahoo executive Mike Walrath says accuracy, flexibility and the ability to easily search for online ad inventory and book a campaign within minutes instead of hours or days is what will separate Yahoo's ad management platform from the pack, which includes Google and Microsoft. Yahoo further expects the platform to help grow its lead in display ads.

Yahoo in April unveiled its chief weapon for this
fight in the form of an all-in-one ad management platform that will eventually
let advertisers buy search, display, local, mobile and video ads from one
location.
The platform was then called AMP, but Yahoo agreed to cease using the
moniker after Collective Intelligence claimed a trademark on it. Yahoo has not revealed
the new name.

The platform is a departure from traditional practices by Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft, which sold ads in different buckets based on ad type.

The platform also reinforces advertising as the single greatest cash cow on
the Internet, becoming just as valuable, if not more, than other forms of advertising
are to e-commerce's brick-and-mortar brethren. Online advertising is the
greatest driver of business on the Web.
Mike Walrath, senior vice president of Yahoo's
Advertising Marketplaces Group, discussed how the platform will change the
online advertising game in an interview with me earlier the week of Aug. 4.
"We want to dramatically simplify the
process of buying and selling ads online," said Walrath, who was CEO
of Right Media before Yahoo acquired the remainder of the company for $680
million in July 2007.

Walrath said current ad management systems, including Google's DoubleClick DART
system and Microsoft's Atlas platform, haven't done much to make the buying and
selling of media easier. That was fine in the beginning of the Internet.

Gone are the early days of just offering text and display ads. Walrath noted
that in the last 10 years, the market has fragmented into multiple demographics
and multiple ad formats, including mobile ads and video ads. Walrath said:

The key for
advertisers is that as their audience fragments, and the consumption shifts to
hundreds of thousands of potential sites where audiences are going to be
consuming content, it's just not as simple as it once was for advertisers to go
out and buy the right audience.

For example, while advertisers were once clear about which
online news publications to target, blogs have clouded the situation, providing
another ocean in which consumers can fish for content. Rather than confusing
people with separate tools, Yahoo wants to funnel them through a single
location.